In a traditional design process, usually, engineers draw a preliminary design of a product in accordance with experiences, make a physical prototype based on the preliminary design, and then carry out characteristics tests or analysis on the physical prototype so as to obtain the characteristics data of the product. If these data do not meet the requirements or specifications of the product, the engineers modify the preliminary design accordingly, produce the trial products, and then test or analyze the trial products. These procedures are repeated until the product meets the desired performance requirements. For a complicated product, the whole design cycle may be very long and it may be very difficult to ensure the design quality during the long design cycle.
With the constantly development of technologies, new design methods and technologies have been emerged. For example, a computer graphic technology, a computer modeling technology, a computer analysis and simulation technology, and so on, have been applied in the engineering design. A serial of CAX tools has been developed based on these technologies. Using these methods, technologies and tools, engineers are able to establish a digitalized model of a product with no need of a physical prototype, analyze a variety of performances of the product based on the digitalized model, inspect and optimize the design of the product, and even analyze the manufacturability thereof, thereby greatly reducing the design costs and design cycle.
However, a product design usually involves multiple fields and multiple disciplines, and needs the support of a large number of special tools. Though these methods, technologies and tools may improve the efficiencies of design integration, yet these tools with different origins have different concepts, languages, technologies, data formats and use styles, and are independently used and isolated from each other in the design process, where a large number of manual operations are still needed to link up a variety of design process, thereby resulting in the low efficiency of designs. Furthermore, the models and data of different design processes are irrelevant, the corresponding design scheme is unchangeable. Accordingly, the efficiency of a design, an analysis and an optimization is still very low.
Additionally, problems to be resolved in nowadays product design are getting more and more complex, and tools used in the product design have more and more functions, thus, engineers/designers need to spend a vast amount of time and energy to understand them. Furthermore, since the operation process, knowledge, experiences and methods in the design process are not reusable and shared in new design projects, even in the similar design projects, the engineers/designers need to start over from scratch. This may result in the operational tools overloaded.
Moreover, a variety of engineering software extensively use a “hard” connection method to achieve the tool integration. The so called ‘hard’ connection refers to develop a special data transformation and processing module between the tools for transferring the data, and connect the tools via a plurality of data processing modules. The method has the advantages: the efficiency is very high for the special design flow or the design layout, and the matching and coordination of a variety of special data and modules is good. However, the flexibility and extendibility of the system are not good. Once the design flow or design layout changes, many intermittent data processing programs are need to be rewritten. It is also very difficult to upgrade and expand the system.
For the reuse of design knowledge and design processes, the usual practice is: carrying out the secondary development on the tool software in accordance with the requirements of the special users, integrating the specialty knowledge, the experiences of experts, design methods or design standards into the functional modules, then improving the efficiency of the tool to realize the reuse of the knowledge and design via using these functional modules. However, this customized secondary development mode has strong specialty and the threshold is very high, the development period is longer without popularity for the engineers, and is also unable to easily carry out function expansion and system maintenance.
Briefly, the conventional computer-aided integrated design methods are still unable to resolve the following problems comprehensively: a variety of tools are not integratable in the design processes, the low level repeated workload of designers are heavy, and the mutual independent links and incompact data and modules relations leads to heavy workload of the coordination and modification of designs. Therefore, it is difficult to achieve the rapid design iteration and optimization. Additionally, a variety of design and analysis tools is still operated in a traditional way. Its operation is very complex and highly relies on the user's experiences. The knowledge and experiences of using the tools can not be reused and shared in different projects. The design efficiency is usually very low.
Therefore, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.